A Climate Depot Special Report debunking a global warming/tornado connection

Morano Statement: “U.S. Senators Boxer and Whitehouse and other global warming activists have descended into buffoonery trying to exploit a natural disaster in Oklahoma. Have you no sense of decency, Senators? At long last, have you left no sense of decency or understanding of science?”

BOXER RINGS THE BELL ON CLIMATE CHANGE: Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif. – Chair of Senate Environment & Public Works Committee) took to the Senate floor and invoked the Oklahoma tornadoes in her speech on global warming. “This is climate change,” she said.

“This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather. Not just hot weather. But extreme weather. When I had my hearings, when I had the gavel years ago. -It’s been a while – the scientists all agreed that what we’d start to see was extreme weather. And people looked at one another and said ‘what do you mean? It’s gonna get hot?’ Yeah, it’s gonna get hot. But you’re also going to see snow in the summer in some places. You’re gonna have terrible storms. You’re going to have tornados and all the rest. We need to protect our people. That’s our number one obligation and we have to deal with this threat that is upon us and that is gonna get worse and worse though the years.”

[Boxer] also plugged her own bill, cosponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would put a tax on carbon. “Carbon could cost us the planet,” she said. “The least we could do is put a little charge on it so people move to clean energy.” (more…)

Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

The press has been quick to jump on the idea that post-tropical cyclone Sandy (it was not a hurricane at landfall) was worsened by anthropogenic global warming and that “superstorms” are here to stay.

But I must ask the impertinent question: could anthropogenic global warming actually have lessened the impacts of Sandy? (more…)

Hurricane Sandy left in its path some impressive statistics. Its central pressure was the lowest ever recorded for a storm north of North Carolina, breaking a record set by the devastating “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938. Along the East Coast, Sandy led to more than 50 deaths, left millions without power and caused an estimated $20 billion or more in damage.

But to call Sandy a harbinger of a “new normal,” in which unprecedented weather events cause unprecedented destruction, would be wrong. This historic storm should remind us that planet Earth is a dangerous place, where extreme events are commonplace and disasters are to be expected. In the proper context, Sandy is less an example of how bad things can get than a reminder that they could be much worse. (more…)

The 2010 Russian heat wave was an extra-ordinary event which killed an estimated 55,000 people during July and early August of that year. The heat wave (and associated drought) also led to crop reductions in Russia by 25%, with an estimated loss in revenue of about 25 billion US dollars. Such an exceptional climate event has prompted many scientists and climate modelers in the US and UK to analyze the large-scale atmospheric sequence of events that led to this exceptionally hot spell in western Russia and, in particular, in and around the city of Moscow, all in attempt to determine if its cause was of natural or anthropogenic origin. In an earlier paper (see Dole et al., 2011) concluded that the 2010 summer Russian heat wave was mainly due to “natural internal atmospheric variability that produced and maintained an intense long-lived blocking event,” further adding that “it is very unlikely that the ‘warming’ attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed substantially to the heat wave.” Other scientist however, have come to a different conclusion. (more…)

A recent paper at SPPI looks at the history of extreme weather events.

The on-going claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been ramped up again lately because of the opportunities presented by the heat wave in Russia and the floods in Pakistan, which are also being claimed as attributable to anthropogenic CO2. If the amount spent on global warming were to be diverted to mitigating and preventing the worst effects of natural disasters, then the desperate plight of the people of Pakistan would be relieved more quickly.

The Aztecs had sophisticated irrigation systems and “astrolonomical” observatories, (apparently a mix of astrology and astronomy), to attempt to predict the weather and reservoirs. But the unseasonal frosts and cold, followed by severe, prolonged drought, may have taken them to the brink of collapse. Once the climate became more benign again, they praised their gods with human sacrifice.

“When rainfall and agriculture had resumed, the Aztecsresponded by massively increasing the number of human sacrifices to their rain god Tlaloc. It is thought that hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed.” (more…)

Several regions of the world are currently coping with severe weather-related events: flash floods and widespread flooding in large parts of Asia and parts of Central Europe while other regions are also affected: by heatwave and drought in Russian Federation, mudslides in China and severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. While a longer time range is required to establish whether an individual event is attributable to climate change, the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.

Even though the IPCC report can be parsed in many ways, I await the textual exegesis that supports the claim that the “sequence of current events matches IPCC predictions.” This will be difficult given that the IPCC didn’t even make projections for 2010. I welcome in the comments efforts to justify the claim by the WMO. (more…)

Hypocrisy in high places is nothing new; but the extent to which it pervades the Climategate Culture – which gave us the hockeystick history of 20th-century global warming – knows no bounds.

Hard on the heels of recent revelations of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the IPCC’s contending that the current level of earth’s warmth is the most extreme of the past millennium, we are being told by Associated Press “science” writer Seth Borenstein (25 November 2009) that “slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives.” And in doing so, he quotes U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as saying that “relying on fossil fuels leads to unhealthy lifestyles, increasing our chances for getting sick and in some cases takes years from our lives.”

Well, if you’re talking about “cook stoves that burn dung, charcoal and other polluting fuels in the developing world,” as Seth Borenstein reports others are doing in producing their prognoses for the future, you’re probably right. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the proper usage of coal, gas and oil. In fact, any warming that might result from the burning of those fuels would likely lead to a significant lengthening of human life.

In an impressive study recently published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, for example, Deschenes and Moretti (2009) analyze the relationship between weather and mortality, based on “data that include the universe of deaths in the United States over the period 1972-1988,” wherein they “match each death to weather conditions on the day of death and in the county of occurrence,” which “high-frequency data and the fine geographical detail,” as they write, allow them “to estimate with precision the effect of cold and hot temperature shocks on mortality, as well as the dynamics of such effects,” most notably, the existence or non-existence of a “harvesting effect,” whereby the temperature-induced deaths either are or are not subsequently followed by a drop in the normal death rate, which could either fully or partially compensate for the prior extreme temperature-induced deaths.

So what did they find?

The two researchers say their results “point to widely different impacts of cold and hot temperatures on mortality.” In the later case, they discovered that “hot temperature shocks are indeed associated with a large and immediate spike in mortality in the days of the heat wave,” but that “almost all of this excess mortality is explained by near-term displacement,” so that “in the weeks that follow a heat wave, we find a marked decline in mortality hazard, which completely offsets the increase during the days of the heat wave,” such that “there is virtually no lasting impact of heat waves on mortality [italics added].”

In the case of cold temperature days, they also found “an immediate spike in mortality in the days of the cold wave,” but they report that “there is no offsetting decline in the weeks that follow,” so that “the cumulative effect of one day of extreme cold temperature during a thirty-day window is an increase in daily mortality by as much as 10% [italics added].” In addition, they say that “this impact of cold weather on mortality is significantly larger for females than for males,” but that “for both genders, the effect is mostly attributable to increased mortality due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”

In further discussing their findings, Deschenes and Moretti state that “the aggregate magnitude of the impact of extreme cold on mortality in the United States is large,” noting that it “roughly corresponds to 0.8% of average annual deaths in the United States during the sample period.” And they estimate that “the average person who died because of cold temperature exposure lost in excess of ten years of potential life [italics added],” whereas the average person who died because of hot temperature exposure likely lost no more than a few days or weeks of life. Hence, it is clear that climate-alarmist concerns about temperature-related deaths are wildly misplaced, and that halting global warming – if it could ever be done – would lead to more thermal-related deaths, because continued warming, which is predicted to be greatest in earth’s coldest regions, would lead to fewer such fatalities.

Interestingly, the two scientists report that many people in the United States have actually taken advantage of these evident facts by moving “from cold northeastern states to warm southwestern states.” Based on their findings, for example, they calculate that “each year 4,600 deaths are delayed by the changing exposure to cold temperature due to mobility,” and that “3% to 7% of the gains in longevity experienced by the U.S. population over the past three decades are due to the secular movement toward warmer states in the West and the South, away from the colder states in the North.”

It’s really a no-brainer. An episode of extreme cold can shave an entire decade off one’s life, while an episode of extreme warmth typically hastens death by no more than a few weeks. If you love life, therefore, you may want to reconsider the so-called “morality” of the world’s climate-alarmist’s perverse prescription for planetary health.

For more information on this important subject, we suggest that you see the most recent publication (Climate Change Reconsidered) of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. If Borenstein were a real science writer, he would check out the findings of the voluminous body of peer-reviewed scientific literature on this and many other related subjects that is reported there. To simply ignore the other side of the issue, especially in a “news” story, must surely come close to bordering on fraud. But we guess that must be the defining characteristic of the Climategate Culture.